Edward N. Costikyan, Adviser to New York Politicians, Is Dead at 87

Edward N. Costikyan, a former adviser to New York governors and mayors who as a Democratic Party insurgent in the early 1960s took over the leadership of the party as it rooted out a century of Tammany Hall bossism, died on Friday at his home in Mount Pleasant, S.C. He was 87.

His daughter, Emilie, confirmed the death.

It was in March 1962, four months after the ouster of the imperious party boss Carmine G. De Sapio, that Mr. Costikyan was elected leader of a party organization tainted since the 1860s by the prodigious corruption of Boss William Tweed.

After Mr. Costikyan’s two years as leader, many Manhattan Democrats, including Mr. Costikyan, said that Tammany Hall was no more. All that remained, they said, was simply the New York County Democratic Party.

“He was a transitional link from the collapse of Tammany Hall to the modern-day Manhattan party structure,” said Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy at New York University. “It went from warlord to a series of would-be bosses.”

Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, a Republican, chose him as chairman of a commission that in 1972 called for the decentralization of New York City’s government. In 1986, at the height of the city’s Parking Violations Bureau scandal — involving a bribery and kickback scheme that brought down powerful Democratic politicians and raised the profile of Rudolph W. Giuliani, then a Republican prosecutor — Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and Mayor Edward I. Koch, both Democrats, appointed Mr. Costikyan to a special panel investigating ways to prevent corruption.

In 1994, Mr. Guiliani, by then the mayor, asked Mr. Costikyan to draft a plan to eliminate the city’s central Board of Education and place the school system under mayoral control — a reorganization realized under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

“He was the go-to guy for politicians of both parties,” Professor Moss said. “Throughout his career, he was a forceful advocate for modernizing government and the decentralization of urban services, though he wasn’t always successful.”

Edward Nazar Costikyan was born on Sept. 14, 1924, in Weehawken, N.J. His father, Mihran, an Armenian immigrant from Turkey, was a rug merchant. Mr. Costikyan’s mother, Berthe, was a teacher at the Horace Mann School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Mr. Costikyan graduated from that school in 1941.

In World War II, as an Army first lieutenant, he saw action on Okinawa, then served as the military governor for a small district in Korea. He graduated from Columbia University in 1947 and earned his law degree there two years later. Within a year he had become law secretary to Judge Harold R. Medina of the United States District Court in Manhattan.

In 1951, he joined the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and he became a partner in 1960.

Photo

Edward N. Costikyan, left, was the campaign manager for Abraham D. Beame in his 1965 bid for New York mayor.Credit
Ernie Sisto/The New York Times

In 1950, Mr. Costikyan married Frances Holmgren, and the couple moved to East 53rd Street. He waded into clubhouse politics and in 1955 was elected Democratic leader of the Assembly district in his East Side neighborhood, placing him on the party’s executive committee.

Stirrings of reform were being heard. Mr. Costikyan joined other reformers in 1960 to circulate a petition calling for Mr. De Sapio’s ouster, saying that his “bossism” — overseeing a strict precinct-based structure with patronage based on party loyalty — would give the Republicans a powerful issue in the next election. The reformers were supported by Mayor Robert F. Wagner, a Democrat.

In fall 1961, Mr. De Sapio was deposed. On March 2, 1962, Mr. Costikyan was elected Democratic leader and began a balancing act of trying to democratize the party while still dealing with its old guard. Indeed, reform Democrats criticized him for being too willing to compromise with the party regulars.

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Municipal reform remained a concern after he resigned from his party post and went into private law practice. As chairman of Governor Rockefeller’s 1972 task force on city government, Mr. Costikyan recommended that the city be carved into 25 to 40 districts, each with its own “locality mayor” and council administering services like street cleaning, schools and even police patrols. (Some said the governor created the task force because of his rivalry with Mayor John V. Lindsay, a Republican turned Democrat who had campaigned as a reformer.)

Mr. Costikyan acknowledged that decentralization was no cure-all for inaccessible government agencies. But political clubs no longer held sway in the television era, he said, and that left a vacuum: nothing to mediate between neighborhoods and the bureaucracies downtown. Criticism of his report, Mr. Costikyan said, was based on fear among the “liberal-intellectual middle class” that poor people were incapable of self-government.

After his first marriage ended in divorce, Mr. Costikyan married Barbara Heine, a freelance writer, on March 6, 1977. Four days later, he announced he was running for mayor.

“I know what a long shot my campaign is,” he said at a news conference.

He joined a Democratic field that would grow to include Mr. Koch and Bella Abzug; Representative Herman Badillo; Percy Sutton, the Manhattan borough president; Mr. Cuomo, then New York’s secretary of state; and Mayor Abraham D. Beame, who was seeking re-election in the face of rising crime and a worsening economy.

Two months later, short of money and support, he pulled out of the race to become co-chairman of Mr. Koch’s campaign. Mr. Koch went on to win the mayoral election.

The Parking Violations Bureau scandal, in which officials accepted hidden partnerships and bribes in exchange for granting contracts to fine-collection agencies, drew Mr. Costikyan back into public service as a member of the special commission on corruption formed by Governor Cuomo and Mayor Koch. Its report called for changes in campaign financing, ethics rules, judicial selection and contracting practices.

In spring 1994, Mayor Giuliani asked Mr. Costikyan to come up with a plan for replacing the city’s schools chancellor with an education commissioner. The mayor had engaged in a long feud with the central board and several chancellors. Then, on July 10, 1995, in a sharp escalation of the tension, Mr. Giuliani formed a commission — with Mr. Costikyan as chairman — to investigate criminal activity in the system and the effectiveness of the central board in maintaining school safety. The next day, Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines resigned.

Mr. Costikyan’s second marriage also ended in divorce. Besides his daughter, he is survived by a son, Gregory; his brother, Andrew; and five grandchildren.

Mr. Costikyan also made a mark, though a lesser one, in music. For more than 30 years, up to 80 lawyers, relatives and friends of lawyers — all amateur musicians and singers — would gather for the Christmas concert of the Occasional Oratorio and Orchestral Society, a group founded by Mr. Costikyan and a fellow Columbia Law School graduate, William M. Kahn, in 1950.

On the conductor’s podium, at not quite 5-foot-5, Mr. Costikyan would bob and weave to the strains of Stravinsky and Handel. During the society’s 1982 concert at the City Bar Association building in Manhattan, Mr. Costikyan was heard urging, “O.K., cellists and bassists, plenty of schmaltz.”

Correction: July 21, 2012

An obituary on June 23 about Edward N. Costikyan, a former adviser to New York governors and mayors, referred incorrectly to Mr. Costikyan’s connection to Tammany Hall, a private organization that was for many years closely linked with the New York County Democratic Party. While the news media frequently used the term “Tammany Hall” to refer to the party and its members, Mr. Costikyan was an official only of the party; he was never “on Tammany Hall’s executive committee” or “elected leader of Tammany Hall.”

Correction: June 26, 2012

An obituary on Saturday about Edward N. Costikyan, a former adviser to New York governors and mayors, misstated the year he joined the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He joined the firm in 1951 and became a partner in 1960; he did not join the firm as a partner in 1964 after resigning from a Democratic Party post. The obituary also referred incorrectly to the candidates for mayor of New York in the 1977 Democratic primary. While the field indeed included two members of Congress, those representatives were Edward I. Koch and Herman Badillo — not Mr. Koch and Bella Abzug. (Ms. Abzug had left Congress in 1976.)

A version of this article appears in print on June 23, 2012, on Page D8 of the New York edition with the headline: Edward Costikyan, 87; Advised Top New York Officials. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe